The division is part of the Florida Department of Management Services (DMS) and is responsible for all state contracts and agreements for commodities and services.
Tyler Brown, a technical lead for the division, kicked off the webinar by sharing how the integration into MyFloridaMarketPlace was part of a recent statewide e-procurement transformation of legacy applications that have been around since 2003.
“It was time to upgrade,” Brown said. “We moved over to a modern cloud-based suite of applications in July of 2022, and after that, one of our biggest initiatives was to modernize Florida’s quarterly sales reporting process.”
According to the department’s website, vendors with an active state contract or agreement procured by the division must submit a quarterly sales report through the division’s vendor information portal, also known as VIP or MyFloridaMarketPlace. These reports often contain information such as invoice numbers, customer entity names, product and service descriptions, and sales numbers and are due within 30 days of each quarter’s end.
Vendors can input all this information into a standardized reporting template available on the division’s website. Once all the information has been filled out, it can be submitted to VIP.
The standardized template is not a new concept. However, Brown said, “We did take some opportunities to really operationalize and create some efficiencies through that template.”
For example, he explained: “Imagine you were hired to manage enterprise contracts for one of the largest states in the country. You’re a week into your job, and you quickly realize at least half of your time will be spent managing a very administrative task of following up with your vendors on quarterly sales reporting, reviewing reports for accuracy and consolidating sales data so it can actually be usable. By the time you accomplish all that, you hardly have any time to use the data you’ve worked so hard to collect.”
To avoid this issue, the division turned to automation and working with contract managers to better understand the reporting process and implemented the following:
- A self-service option that allows vendors to submit and edit their QSR
- Systematically controlled submission windows to make it easier to add information
- Improved data quality by capturing submissions in the existing vendor registration system and providing feedback at the point of submission
- Exporting clean QSR data to Tableau for improved reporting
Moving forward, the division is looking into how it can benefit from the updated solution for planning solicitations and making further enhancements to the vendor submission template.
More information about the system and how it works can be found online.
